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***

So . . . here we are.

Even after that wonderfully useful explanation of yours, I’ve no doubt you were startled when I roused you up once more and burnt the fever from your veins, sealing that ragged wound with a touch (just like my own throat, at last. Like Anthea’s pale shoulder, under her muslin gown.) And saying, as I did, in true Galilean style: Awake, O sleeper—Lazarus, I command you, roll away the stone. Come out. Come back.

I am not done with you, Agent . . . no, not yet.

Maybe not ever.

Here you are again, though, after all that—made almost good as new, barring some ill-usage. And it’s thus I’ll send you back to your masters, to Doc Asbury himself, who I reckon may well wish to study you for years: a living dead man, walking and talking, to demonstrate the untapped depth of my powers. But one way or the other, I’ll trust you to warn them to leave me alone, from now on—not because Satan’s Jewel Crown is far too small a place for them to trouble with, so much, but because if they do not, far worse things may . . . hell, will . . . happen.

Think about it this way, Agent Law, and inform others accordingly. When I die, whether by natural means or otherwise, I expect the town will go with me—fall silent forever, like a stopped clock. That’s what I hope. But there’s always the alternative: a general exodus in the wake of my passing, these people I’ve sacrificed so much for streaming out across the land like locusts, rotten and hungry, to spread their awful sickness everywhere they turn . . .

And why should this be my legacy, anyhow? Well, we know that all hexes’ power centres around what they know best, the thing most familiar to ‘em: Chess Pargeter with his guns, Reverend Rook his Bible. The Chinee and Indian hexes have their traditions. I once heard of a woman burnt back in Caxton who’d used embroidery, sewing her desires onto the world around her. So is there something in me that’s equal-hungry and cold and rotten, at my core? Or is it just that when it came upon me, when I cut my own throat and first made sacrifice to myself, I had already given myself up for dead?

Little enough pleasure to be had in a corpse. Yet I will take what I can, and call myself thankful for it.

You see, I know what I am, now, for which I really do thank you—my true nature, what I’ve been capable of, thus far. Yet I don’t think I know the extent of what I might still achieve, if I’m given reason enough to push things further. Which is why it’s better for all concerned that I not be—you, most especially.

If (when) I die, you die, too—finally, fully. It’s a foregone conclusion.

Better to leave me alone, again, from now on: here on my throne, king of all I survey, danced attendance on by my dead wife’s body and my dead daughter’s ghost. A lost, uncertain thing no more, though forever damned to wear what my town’s named after; if the shoe fits, as they say. And after this, all who meet me—thanks to you—will surely know it does.

(Meem knew already, it occurs to me. Perhaps because she was as I am, or might have been; another hex, potentially—a friend, a companion, far more than her mother is, or can be. But still I let her lie, as she asked me to.)

Mister Phillips, Myrtella; it’s all the same. I’m both, and neither. I’m what I am, only—nothing ever seen before, and nothing to be trifled with. And this much is certain, either way . . .

. . . even if I don’t want anything more than what I already have, I will never settle for anything less.

THE SALT WEDDING

Oh the bodies rise and fall in slow motion,

As the flesh gives way to coral and her charms.

If you listen hard, you’ll hear the sea is breathing,

And she’s waiting there to hold you in her arms.

—Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

That one time in Porte Macoute, Tante Ankolee: A wise woman, cunning sorceress. Who buy she-self out-bondage wit’ her own money, make she livin’ wit’ her charm, who owe no debt and leave no insult unpaid. Who all men fear an’ all women come to, ‘specially in them time o’ worst need. Whose magic like the sea itself, so dreadful-strong and changeable, much deeper still than any grave. That one time, she.

Ta she door one day a Navy man come, upright-stiff an’ white in him great blue coat. Him who take him hat off t’address her, same as if she na wear a bone t’rough she lip or bells in she hair. Captain C

ollyer, that him name, an’ he come ta tell her strange news only she might know how ta deal wit’, offerin’ the king’s penny for she trouble. Need her help, him say, but she know she got no choice, nah really—for even there on the very edge o’things, it nah good form ta turn what that old, cold England-King send ya away.

Tante Ankolee, our ancestress, who no man never make slave, not even when she wear him chain; hush nah, child, an’ listen. For ‘tis always useful ta hear of she doin’s, no matter how long time agone, if only ta know what might be possible, under similar circumstance. Ta see proof how a woman of this family can seize hold o’ fate like a damn horse and ride, if only she know how. Thus, and so: The tale commence, and go now ‘til ‘tis done.

***

The Navy man sweated hard in Porte Macoute’s heat, being no doubt unused to such temperatures. Or perhaps it was Tante Ankolee’s presence alone made him so strained and shiny—she liked to think so, for he himself was not ill-looking, for a white man. But from her own experience the better policy by far, if one wished to ‘scape danger, was always to assume nothing.

“You are kin of a sort to the Rusks of Veritay Island, I hear,” he said, one hand at his high-buttoned collar, to which she nodded. Then, studying her closer, seemingly bent on mapping the spray of freckles ‘cross both her tea-colored cheeks: “Some . . . distant kin, perhaps?”

“Nah quite so distant as them make it sound, no, if it they the ones y’ask. Old Carson Rusk, him buy me maman at that same market outside me door here an’ get me on her whilst him wife sick wit’ child-bed fever, then keep her an’ me both ta raise him full children while still sowin’ bastards aplenty, wit’ her an’ otherwise. Yet lucky for us, Aphra-Maîtresse an’ Maman cleave together as firm friends once they get t’know each other, much ta Old Rusk’s confoundation.”

Here she gifted him with her favorite brand of smile—sharp-curved lips rimmed in tattoo-blue, with a dull line of teeth just showing, in between—and watched him blush awhile at the way it made him feel, let alone in what region.